The Stately Elm
by The Hermione Granger Fan Club
Summary: The events of the Lisbon girls' attempt to save Cecilia's elm tree. Composed of details from both the book and the film- I think it's the better of my two VS fics to date.


Another dismal day in captivity. The four remaining Lisbon girls had chosen Lux and Therese's room for their hideout that day and occupied themselves in decidedly normal pastimes. Therese had a pile of science books resting on her knees, the weight marking ridges into her thighs. Lux came in from the bathroom, damp smears on her face from where she'd been puffing cigarette smoke into a wet towel. One of Mary's fashion magazines dangled from her hand, and she dropped it beside her older sister nonchalantly, flopping onto the bed.  
  
Mary nodded at her, snipping a picture of a Chippendale couch from a catalogue. Therese looked over at Mary and smirked. "Give it up, sis."  
  
"Why don't you?" Mary scowled. Cutting out more pictures for her locker was far less ludicrous than idly studying for a test that had been marked and handed back two weeks ago.  
  
Bonnie entered the room once more, holding four tall glasses of orange juice.  
  
"Thank you, Bonnie," said Mary distractedly.  
  
Lux gave her older sister a faint smile. "Cool, Bonnie."  
  
"Thanks, Bon." Therese turned a page and scribbled something into a notebook without looking at it.  
  
With a funny look on her face, Bonnie said, "The removal men are here."  
  
Silence.  
  
"You guys want to... go and watch?"  
  
Therese closed the topmost book and shoved it off her knees, ramming her feet into slippers. Mary and Lux dutifully followed their sisters. Mary slipped on her platforms at the top of the stairs and descended them precariously. Lux dared to giggle and gave Mary's hair a tug.  
  
"My hair is NOT limp," hissed Mary, as if she and Lux had been having an argument about it.  
  
Curiously, Bonnie had ended up at the rear of the procession. She cleared the dust out of her nightdress pocket with her fingertips, balling it up and flicking it away. It did not clear the banister but landed ungracefully in a bowl of moulding cereal that Therese had left there. She would sit, oddly, on the stairs to eat her breakfast, as though she always planned to take it up to her room but couldn't quite be bothered to climb all the way with the food. Or even to wash up the plates.  
  
And so the four of them gathered around the coloured disc of mottled glass set into the door, jostling for a better view.  
  
"Can you-" began Therese, just as the roar of chainsaws filled the air. They all winced.  
  
Mary's breath caught in her throat, and Luxie accidentally nudged her. Later, almost asleep, Mary supposed this was what had prompted her blank mind and set lips to come out with the words, "Come on!" and her hands to push the unlocked door open.  
  
There was a shatter as Therese dropped her glass and the remains of her orange juice on the doorstep. The girls darted out. Mary nearly tripped on the stairs because of her platform sandals, and they heard their mother yell from the kitchen for them to come as she heard the desperate clatter of them running, running...  
  
Lux took the lead, and almost smacked into the tree face first, skidding to a halt. She stepped forward to meet it, one foot on either side of a protruding root. Mary, unusually, tripped again. It was a good thing she did, because this was what allowed her to clear a nearby chainsaw. The girls questioned later if she'd even tripped at all, but they considered that small fact so silly that they never did actually ask Mary about it.  
  
Lux felt Bonnie's hand, warm and a little moist from having to wash out the glasses before filling them. They laced their fingers together and heard two more THUMPs of Mary and then Therese hitting the tree.  
  
One of the men swore, and the four sisters exchanged some comforting banter that was not heard or ever spoken of again.  
  
"You got my hand? Come on, hold on tighter-" Therese murmured, her hair sweeping against the bark as she threw it back for a slightly distorted view of the enemy, and to check each sister was holding on properly.  
  
"Yeah, it's gonna be OK," said Lux bravely. Bonnie quoted the Bible, a verse even Bonnie couldn't remember afterwards.  
  
Loudly, drowning out all of her sisters to the world, Mary said, "Go away. This is our tree."  
  
"Girls, girls," the foreman said in what he thought was a soothing voice. "You're too late. The tree's already dead."  
  
Bonnie pressed her forehead into the bark, inhaling the scent. She could feel some kind of aura inside that tree, something shining out and clearing the heady tiredness from her aching brain. Pulsing and flowing through the very sap of the stately elm. Therese had told her that saints had been painted with halos because it was believed that their souls were so pure they shone through their skin and made them not only good but beautiful. It was kinda like that.  
  
"That's what YOU say..." Mary stage-muttered defiantly.  
  
"It's got beetles. We have to take it down so they won't spread to other trees," he told them, sounding like he thought they were stupid.  
  
Therese chimed in with her bit. "There's no scientific evidence that removal limits infestation. These trees are ancient. They have evolutionary strategies to deal with beetles. Why don't you just leave it up to nature?"  
  
Those last words were the ones that had become poor Cecilia's mantra in the tree problem. It was one of the only thing she'd really been passionate about, towards the end. She'd insisted time and time again that it was a plot. "A plot to make everything flat!" she'd said, and to the amusement of her sisters said that something must be done. To squash her rare show of involvement, Therese had obliged and dug up some research for her to peruse under the sleepy orbit of her zodiac mobile- some of the same facts Therese spouted at that moment.  
  
You had better be damn grateful, Ceel, thought Lux silently.  
  
"If we left it up to nature there'd be no trees left!" argued the foreman.  
  
Lux made an impatient noise. "That's what it's going to be like ANYWAY."  
  
Bonnie nodded as best she could, while pressed into the tree. She turned and gave the men a glare. "If boats hadn't brought the fungus from Europe, none of this would have happened."  
  
"You can't put the genie back in the bottle, girls. Now we've got to use our own technology to see what we can save."  
  
"We're not moving and you can't make us!" sniffed Mary childishly. Therese gave her a look of alarm as she imagined being forever linked to her sisters, celebrating her hundredth birthday with her hand still sweatily clasped in Mary's.  
  
Another removal worker stepped forward, putting his hand on Lux's shoulder. As though unaccustomed to a man's touch, she jerked it away, glowering at him. He tried a different tactic. "Girls, come on. You're all far too old to carry on like this. If you step away from the tree, we'll give you a ride on the truck."  
  
They said nothing, still grimly encircling Cecilia's beloved elm. Bonnie imagined that her deceased sibling was sitting up there in her regal fashion, her chin propped boredly in her hands and her bicycle leaning against the trunk. Her diary would be wedged safely between her torso and the branch while she looked out on the street. Ceel always arched her back like a cat to retrieve her diary, which would slide along a few inches before being picked up and written in.  
  
It was certainly a nicer memory, and somehow more typical of Cecilia Lisbon than to recall her prone form- Bonnie still refused to think of her little sister as a corpse- jammed onto the spikes of the fence.  
  
"No," Therese said stubbornly.   
  
"You think you can BRIBE us?" said Lux, with a musical and bitter laugh.  
  
The fight raged on, and a nice crowd was gathering on the sidewalk. Chase and Johnny Buell gawped shamelessly, joined by Tim Winer and strangely, Paul Baldino.  
  
Finally, the men broke for lunch, assuming the Lisbon sisters would give up. This gave them a chance to talk a little, quietly.  
  
"Why'd you do it, Mary?" asked Lux in hushed tones. "I mean, how'd we end up trying to save the tree?"  
  
"I don't... know," Mary blustered.   
  
"You fell a couple of times," Therese said unnecessarily. "Don't ever go near a cliff wearing those shoes, Mary."  
  
The girls giggled weakly.  
  
"At least we're saving her tree," said Bonnie. "Ceel's, I mean."  
  
"Cecilia's?" asked Lux. "I sort of thought of it more as Therese's. All those samples she took from it."  
  
"No," said Mary. "You just didn't go near this tree. She'd go ballistic right now if she knew we were like, touching it."  
  
No giggles. Seriously, Bonnie said, "She's still- around, you know. It's not like she's disappeared completely."  
  
"Don't pull your spiritual crap on us now, Bonnie," said Therese briskly. She rarely swore, at least aloud, but she preferred logic.  
  
"She liked all that reincarnation stuff. No wonder her favourite place was India." This was mortifying for Mary as she'd just realised she wasn't wearing makeup. She hid her face.  
  
Lux snorted. "I don't remember Cecilia ever going to India."  
  
"Shh, people are staring," instructed Therese, and they stood in quiet for the rest of the removal men's lunch break.   
  
And they barely heard as their parents argued with the foreman upon his return, their mother exhibiting a type of strength so reminiscent of each girl. They had never stood together like this, all five Lisbon daughters- five, yes, because of the part of Cecilia undoubtedly still living in the elm.  
  
Lydia Perl from Channel Six pulled up when their parents had gone into the house, and Mary felt Therese drop her hand. "Let's go."  
  
"What...?"  
  
"We can't be seen," Therese said mournfully, and reluctantly the four teenagers stepped away from Cecilia's tree and ran for the house.  
  
There was no dinner that night, and the girls sat as far away as was possible from the window in Mary and Bonnie's room. Mrs Lisbon stopped in the doorway for a few moments and spoke only these words to her disobedient children.  
  
"I don't ever want you girls to do something like that again."  
  
Uncharacteristically, all of the girls looked up. Therese was the only one who smiled, and Lux the only one to speak. "Yes, Mom."  
  
That night, Lux secretly employed the telephone in cancelling a rooftop tryst with a boy from town and instead retired straight to her room. There, she was struck with the idea of writing a word or two into Cecilia's diary, and turned her younger sister's room upside-down in trying to find the damn thing.  
  
Funnily, it was gone. It was a nice change, going straight to bed instead of meeting up with an 'old friend', and made her feel like she was a little girl again, and Cecilia even littler, slumbering one room over but very much alive.  
  
Lux Lisbon slept that night with but one ideal in her jaded mind- if Cecilia ever came back, she'd be a rich Indian woman or perhaps even a new elm, trembling innocently towards the sun.  
  
* * *  
  
DISCLAIMER: 'The Virgin Suicides' and all characters thereof are the property of Jeffrey Eugenides and Sofia Coppola. Not me. So don't sue.  
  
NOTE: I have combined both the book and the film in writing this- I received the novel as a Christmas gift. Bloody fantastic book, that was.  
  
I don't know why I like the idea of Cecilia and India so much- she looked very at home in the imaginary holiday snap of herself as a bride in Calcutta. Does anyone know where to find good-sized pictures of Cecilia in the film? For free, I mean. 


End file.
